On March 28, US president Joe Biden unveiled his 2023 budget proposal. It totals $5.8 trillion, which would bring federal spending and deficits back below their pandemic-era heights (although not back to 2019 levels). Biden’s ask comes to nearly $18,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.

Oddly, The Hill reports, the White House’s big brag on the proposal is that it would  reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next ten years.

Usually when a politician pitches a plan to do something over the  course of a decade, I expect a bunch of rosy projections that won’t ever come to pass. It’s easy to make promises now and leave them to another president and other Congresses to keep.

This proposal doesn’t even bother with the rosy projections, though. Its  tables, which run through 2032, project higher, not lower, deficits. The 2023 deficit would come to $1.154 trillion, the 2032 deficit to $1.784 trillion. The cumulative projected deficit for the period 2023-2032 would increase the national debt to nearly half again its current total of $30 trillion.

Then again, perhaps those projections ARE rosy.  They assume ever-increasing federal revenues and spending, with no obstacles to the US government’s ability to borrow as much as it feels like borrowing. None of those are safe assumptions.

Of course, presidential budget proposals are just that — proposals. Since the 1920s, the president has been legally required to submit one to Congress each year. But Congress isn’t required to pass it. It’s always modified, and the modifications are almost always upward.

The problem is exacerbated by the US government’s “baseline budgeting” accounting method, under which the starting point for all spending is the current level and it’s assumed spending will increase from that level to account for inflation and population growth.

In other words, spending increases are automatic, while spending cuts (even cuts to the projected increases!) require explicit congressional action. And cuts to projected increases are always portrayed by their opponents as actual cuts in the fights over such action.

American politicians don’t fight to cut spending, borrowing, debt, or deficits. They just fight over how much to increase all four. They’re building a house of cards, and one day a stiff breeze will come along and blow that house — and them — over.

Could this be fixed? Well, maybe. A good start would entail two elements.

The first would be actually ending, not just promising to someday reduce, deficit spending. That is, plausibly estimate revenues and budget to spend less than those revenues.

The second would be to eliminate “baseline budgeting” and require every department to justify every dime it asks for every year.

Will that happen? Almost certainly not. The American political establishment’s deficit disorder is chronic, probably incurable, and eventually fatal.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

On March 28, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1557 — the “Parental Rights in Education Bill” — into law.

Supporters say it is indeed about parental rights:  The right to know what their kids are being taught, and the right to be informed about matters pertaining to their kids’ “mental, emotional, or physical well-being.”

Opponents call it the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” and assert that its purpose is to terrorize members of the LGBTQ community working in public education by forbidding mention of their sexual orientations/gender identities, and to isolate LGBTQ students who may be afraid to come out to their parents and, under this law, to seek support and affirmation at school, lest they be outed.

Both sides are right. The  law does require parental access to student records, and notification of parents when school personnel address, or know of, issues related to a student’s “mental, emotional, or physical well-being.”

But it actual purpose is political.

Supporters use one snippet of the bill — “[c]lassroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 …” — to claim that it’s just about sex education in the lower grades.

They leave out the following clause: “… or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

Teachers rightfully fear that, say, casually mentioning their same-sex spouses might be deemed “age-inappropriate classroom instruction.” And LGBTQ students rightfully fear that teachers  will consider themselves legally required to out them.

What gives the bill  teeth is its enforcement mechanism: A parent may “[b]ring an action against the school district …. A court may award damages …”

It’s designed to encourage little Sally’s parents to sue the school district if Sally mentions that her teacher said he and his husband went to Italy over summer vacation. Or if Sally asks to be called Sam and wear “boy’s clothes,” and they suspect that she mentioned this in school and it wasn’t reported to them.

It’s designed, above all, to energize Republican voters and get them to the polls for Republican candidates.

During the pandemic, many schools shut down and went to “remote learning.” Parents looking on during Zoom classes noticed what and how their kids were being taught. Some of them didn’t like it.

The public education establishment reacted patronizingly, telling parents they were unqualified to have an opinion and should leave education to the “experts” (them). That dismissive attitude produced anger — as it should have.

Now Republicans are weaponizing that anger with bills like the “Parental Rights in Education Bill,”  tailored not just to the anger itself, but also to specific fears that they know will mobilize and energize their electoral base.

The “Don’t Say Gay Bill” is what we get when politics and education combine to produce a “wedge issue.” So long as education is politically funded and politically regulated, we’ll never lack for such issues.

The only way to get the culture wars out of education is to separate school and state.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

Supreme Court associate justice Clarence Thomas “faces growing ethics questions,” The Hill‘s John Kruzel reports, “after recent reports of his wife’s aggressive effort to overturn former President Trump’s electoral defeat and participation in the Jan. 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally have renewed scrutiny of the justice’s refusal to step aside from related disputes that have come before the Supreme Court.”

Meanwhile, under pressure from a public beginning to notice the striking correlation between membership in Congress and a sharp eye for the best investments, Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced bills to ban members and their families from buying and selling stocks while in office.

The  overlap of these two sets of ethics problems — a judge’s possible prejudice in favor of his spouse’s views and affiliations versus an elected official’s potential ability to trade (or have a spouse or child trade) stocks based on inside legislative scoop — is the family angle. That creates a third ethics problem running in the other direction.

Virginia Thomas isn’t her husband. She’s neither a Supreme Court justice nor an employee of the federal government. She’s thus presumptively entitled to engage in whatever kind of political speech and advocacy, and affiliate with whatever political organizations, she pleases.

The spouses and children of congresspeople are, likewise, not themselves congresspeople. If they want to invest their money in stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency or losing bets on the Kansas City Chiefs to beat the Cincinnati Bengals (yes, I’m still sore about that), it’s their money and nobody’s business but theirs.

It’s one thing to impose restrictions and guidelines on people who have sought and accepted particular jobs. They agree to those restrictions and guidelines as part of the deal.

It’s another thing entirely to assume such authority over people who haven’t even sought, let alone been offered or accepted, such employment and who, especially in the case of children, may not have even been consulted on the matter of the other person’s political or employment ambitions.

The former makes sense. The latter is just … well, unethical. And while not doing it just because it’s unethical doesn’t solve those other two problems, neither would doing it.

Suppose that the spouses of Supreme Court justices were forbidden to endorse candidates, donate to or work for campaigns, hire on at political organizations, etc. Does anyone believe that such restrictions would stop Virginia Thomas from expressing her opinions to her husband over dinner, or that those opinions would have any less (or more) an effect on his rulings?

Suppose that the spouses and children of congresspeople were forbidden to invest in particular companies. How would that stop those congresspeople from trading their insider information for, say, future “revolving door” employment opportunities, or just having old law school buddies, sisters-in-law, etc. do the investing for them?

For obvious reasons, Virginia Thomas shouldn’t be allowed to argue before the Supreme Court while her spouse sits on it, and Justice Thomas should recuse himself from any cases that represent a plausible conflict of interest due to her affiliations.

Likewise, members of Congress who get caught using their privileged access to information for insider trading, even through proxies, should be punished.

But trying to run these family members’ lives isn’t an ethical, or effective, solution to the problems involved.

What, short of eliminating all these government positions (which I favor), might constitute such a solution? How about a constitutional amendment reserving such positions to unmarried, childless individuals?

That seems like a hard proposal to sell our politicians on. And, as the history of the Holy Roman Catholic Church demonstrates, it comes with its own set of equally intractable problems.

The imperfect, but probably better, solution: Rigorous investigation and harsh enforcement of conflict of interest and insider trading violations where government officials themselves are involved.

Which we’ll probably get about the time flying pigs taxi for their takeoffs from the frozen surface of hell.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY